Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Monday November 11, 2013 @08:50PM
from the reading-is-hard dept.

First time accepted submitter sqorbit writes "Netflix and Youtube are gaining ground not only on the competition, such as Amazon, but also over peer-to-peer file sharing. Netflix claims more than 30 million customers and believes it could double that number in the future. Traffic from Netflix and Youtube amounted to over 50% of Internet traffic in September. Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?"

Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

Or is it something that's not a false dichotomy? An increase in Netflix, YouTube traffic will result in a decrease in the amount of bittorrent traffic in terms of percent, even if absolute usage remains the same. Likewise, a decrease in bittorrent traffic will lead to higher percentages for Netflix and YouTube. That doesn't indicate (or rule out) a relationship between the two (i.e. leaving bittorrent behind for Netflix) except in that it is a relative measure.

It would be more interesting to know how much time YouTube and Netflix are taking away from normal TV viewing. I find that the amateur documentary type videos on YouTube are better than what the BBC puts out these days, like that Brian Cox twat or Horizon post 1990.

Exactly what I was thinking. Netflix has expanded its coverage of HD and 'super HD' while Youtube has increased the quality/resolution of its content as well. Increased quality comes with increased data transfer, while a 700MB file will always transmit 700MB. The customer base has probably grown and there is likely some relationship between the cost effective viewing and increased usage of these services, but overall they are simply sending more data for the same content which makes this a nearly irrelevan

Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

Could be that most download hoarders are finally coming to their senses that out of the 250gigs of MP3s they've downloaded they're really only listening to about 2gigs worth? That's my guess... that and the fact that you can only beat off so many times a year so having 65 days of pr0n doesn't make much sense either.

Or maybe it's people who've gotten sick of downloading 5 gigs worth of an e-book collection for a single book that's about 6 dollars on Amazon.

I know tons of people who've done the bit torrent stockpiling and I've never seen any of them come close to using a double digit percentage of what they've ripped off. It's like the people who get the high end NetFlix package and rip the discs and return them the next day. How many of those discs never get watched? My guess is a ton of them never see the tray of a DVD player.

Regarding the DVD ripping, I tried that back when Blockbuster had the "unlimited rentals with in store exchange" deal going on.

They would mail you 3 DVDs, then you would rip them, drop them off at the store the next day and they would give you 3 in store rentals for free in exchange, while at the same time mailing you 3 more.

When it first came out, they didn't wait for the in-store rentals to be returned before mailing the next set of discs. They changed that at some point.

So you could get up to 12 movies a week if you were swapping them every 3 days or so.

After a few months, I had several TB of hard drive space full of movies that... frankly weren't likely to ever be watched.

Then Blu-Ray came out, and the quality there was good enough that it made the ripped copies look like crap. I ended up deleting them. That was a LOT of hours of time wasted.

So yea, the idea that I'll have this huge horde ended up being rather silly. Now I just put the PS3 or Ruku on and stream more content than I will ever have time to watch and life is good.

Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, and Hulu Plus might not be perfect, they each have their own issues, they don't have "everything", but boy, they sure have enough stuff to keep my family busy most of the time.

Posting as AC since I don't want the CISPA to allow a newly minted Ministry Of Copyrights to send their secret police in the near future....

I've stored over a thousand movies either from direct ripping, or downloading good encodes. I have found that on demand (Netflix) does not have a whole lot going in the movie categories. As a result, I have been watching movies again from my archives. I simply refuse to shell out a couple of bucks each time I want to watch something. Fuck them, I paid to see it in the movie theater, I paid to get the DVD copy, how much blood do they want to siphon off me? So, yes, I do store movies to watch them again, or watch them later on with friends and family. Some stuff is just classic.

It just became a way of life to never ever watch the DVD. In fact, the advertisements and POU's pissed me off so fucking much, I had to rip it first. Actually paying for it (Around 30-40% of my collection are purchases) and being told, "No. You can't skip anything here. Sit down. STFU. Watch the previews".

Right after I had the physical medium in hand I put it in my system, fired up DVD Decrypter, and made an image of the disc to be mounted afterwards and played. Plenty of media players like the WD TV Live will play an.iso file replete with DVD menus.

I don't feel that any of the time has been wasted at all. My collection is nearing 100 TB. At this point I rarely use Netflix for anything other than watching TV shows. That's it's real value to me. TV shows with no advertisements or overlays. I can wait a year till the last season is available.

The biggest failure of Big Entertainment is continuing this greedy war. My offer still stands. I will pay upwards of $50 a month for on-demand viewing of TV shows with ZERO advertisements of any kind. Any other deal they can go fuck themselves with a cactus.

P.S - I still do a brisk business with the DVDs by mail. After I download a good encode for a movie I queue it up on Netflix and quite often never take it out the package when I receive it. I'm sending them back as quick as I get them. Netflix for me is way to compensate the artists.

I used to have eight 3TB hard drives in my home server, storing all my downloaded and ripped videos.

Back when I started in 2006, it was 1TB drives, then 1.5TB drives (Frys had a deal on them back then, $115!). Then 2TB, then 3TB.

I looked at upgrading to 4TB drives, then something caused me to do the math. All the money spent to keep up with it? I could have just bought most of it on Blu-Ray and been done with it.

My local media storage is down to 6.8TB, I've deleted about 10TB worth in the past few months, waste of time, space, and money.

You know what? I don't miss any of it.

What I did keep was stuff that isn't easy to find on the popular services. I have a number of old war movies and documentaries that aren't on the various services, those I kept. I have the complete rip of 10 seasons of Modern Marvels, that is pretty cool and nice for the kids.

Blockbuster movies? Blah, I can stream those, Amazon Prime Video these days looks darn good on the big TV.

100TB collection, over 1,000 movies so assuming 1500 movies, that's an AVERAGE of 68GB per movie. That's bigger than the average BluRay including commentaries and extras. Did you partially decompress your videos or do you have 100TB of raw storage, but RAID 6 in 10disk groups or something?

Im glad im not the only one that raised an eyebrow at 100TB of movies maybe 10TB?

The thing that jumped out at me was your point of Big Entertainment continuing this greedy war and yet you've (supposedly) amassed 100TB's of which less than half you've paid for. Netflix is $10 a month, my cable package lets me DVR all I want for less than $40 a month, then theres Hulu, RedBox and a bunch of other services i've never heard of but are equally as cheap. I have an easy 2TB's of movies over the past 10 years i'

I was doing the same thing with zip.ca up here for a while but stopped after a bit. Zip is another company that is bringing out streaming real soon now (which they have been saying for over 4 years which is why I went to Netflix.ca).

My biggest issue with netflix is they need to have a way of limiting out movies that went straight to DVD. Trying to find a good horror movie that I haven't seen and pretty much all of them are done with HD handi-cams and contain porn-level acting at best.

These days torrents are fast, and of course there is Usenet. Some stuff I had to work a little to get I keep, but if I decided I wanted to watch almost any modern movie this evening I could have downloaded before I get home from work.

Netflix to the rescue! Offer to share your disks in exchange for borrowing someone else's stuff. Does Amazon have a used copy? Ebay? Check Redbox when the Library doesn't have it and can't get it.If you really want something, find it and make your own copy. Don't wait for someone else to just give it to you.

The media that 'surrounds us' currently is trash. This makes it even more important to rescue and protect the classics. Due to the current level of intelligence in society, obscure is 'the good stuff'. In another 15 years if we have lost our 'history', it will be a loss for all.

This also includes books. Especially as more and more move to electronic format only. So much knowledge has been lost due to books fading out before they were rescued.

I was a hoarder. For me, I guess what happened was that my broadband capacity finally reached a point in which I feel comfortable with stuff being in the cloud. If I wanted to watch Star Trek six years ago on my 800Kbps connection, I'd have to torrent every episode. Then I'd burn discs because, in case I wanted to watch again, I didn't want to go through the trouble of redownloading everything - it took days. Now Netflix and Youtube mean that a lot of what I want is permanently (and readily, thanks to a 35Mbps connection) available and I have no reason to hoard anymore, so my torrenting has decreased a lot. Steam sales and Humble Bundles also meant I have essentially stopped pirating (except for good titles with annoying DRM, like Bioshock 2) - I just give it a year of two for games to come to a reasonable price and leave my library on the cloud. I think that's what happened to a lot of people - and, in third world countries, quite recently.

I don't get digital horders. I have a friend who has TB's and TB's of downloaded crap saved on DVD's and USB Hard drives. Why? He will never watch a fraction of this stuff. All those drives aren't cheap either. I have a $7.99 netflix account and can watch reruns of Star Trek TNG (or thousands of other things) if I feel like it. All at the tip of my fingers 24x7. No need to download 7 season's, and the interface on Netflix is much easier then dicking around with finding an episode you may want to watch

As a "hoarder", I've documented my collection pretty well. I never burn anything to DVD's or USB hard drives. Everything is networked and available to all devices.

It's about saving the really classic stuff. The real jewels of my collection are all the Disney and Looney Tunes cartoons. Stuff that is just not available on market today due their outright greed and insane copyright mentality. Some of the collections like M*A*S*H I ripped direct from the DVDs themselves.

The real value of my collection? At some point in the future the stuff I have, while classic, will not be readily available. My collection, nearing triple digit TB's, will be easily duplicated and shared.

My cartoon collection alone is very hard to come by. My younger relatives love to be able to watch Donald Duck and his nephews. Sadly, Disney being the douchenozzles they are have adamantly refused to share those cartoons with today's children.

I fear you're right. Netflix just keeps dropping older stuff, both from streaming and from DVD. I just don't get it.

I don't want to torrent anything! It's just crazy that no one will take my money to stream me the vast back catalog of titles that have entered the digital domain.

It's time for mandatory licensing of older works. You know what - I'm OK with 100 year copyright if after 10 works fall under some FRAND scheme and all the Netflix's of the world get to stream them for a nominal fee.

You take world wide distribution digitally at an annual cost of around $100 (adjusting for local economies) and that adds up to a shitload of residuals for the artists. Can you fucking imagine how much money Disney cartoons, The Three Stooges, M*A*S*H, etc. would generate at that volume?

There is so much good content that has been created that is considered classic, cult classic, etc.

Unfortunately, they want to force feed you the newer content at ever increasing rates

There's no need to have a short copyright term (though the recent extensions are silly), instead we need to change what copyright means, so that you can't restrict the distribution or prevent derivative works. I see no problem with the creator continuing to profit for a long time from some creative work, and that was never really the problem (except with children who demand all things for free). The problem comes when copyright blocks further creative progress, and th

As a hoarder, my downloading has slowed down quite a bit. I've downloaded every TV show and movie I'd ever be interested in watching, in HD if available. Now the only downloading I do is new episodes or new movies (and of course when something I like comes out higher quality). I am indeed quite satisfied with my 10TBs of 281 movies and 82 full series.

But streaming/pay services for video in their current form will never see a penny from me. For the way I consume media, their shortcomings are a deal break

All of your points and concerns are fair and reasonable, I totally understand them.

In my comment, I said that the services today aren't perfect, they are missing some things (like off-line viewing).

But for most people, they are good enough.

People like you will always exist, that's fine, the fact that most people just pay Netflix $8 a month means that the media companies might actually start ignoring you at some point, rather than fighting a pointless crusade against you (that they can't win).

Similar theory: the majority of people who are going to torrent already have their libraries full, regardless of how much they're watching said library

TPB is famous enough that anyone even remotely in tune with the internet at large could easily figure out how to download the complete James Bond collection, or whatever they fancy. But once they have that (and the complete Star Trek collection, Game of Thrones, etc) there isn't as much of a glut. Just steadily downloading new stuff as it becomes available.

Or maybe it's people who've gotten sick of downloading 5 gigs worth of an e-book collection for a single book that's about 6 dollars on Amazon.

Actually I think it's the complete opposite, it's the knowledge that yes I'll easily find a torrent that has it and yes the speed will be good, so there's very little reason to hoard it just to have it available or to avoid downloading it again. With the war on piracy it seemed for a while like the good times would come to an end, napster shut down, grokster shut down, winmx shut down, suprnova shut down, grab it now while it's easy because tomorrow it might be harder. With the TPB raid and trial I'd say th

I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.

I was indifferent about YouTube until it inexplicably linked itself to my Gmail account and now wants me to create a Google+ page in order to comment on videos. Now, I'd like nothing more to see it go up in flames, like a Tesla that hit some road debris.

I compensated for that by deleting my YouTube channel account. I encourage every one else to do the same.

One of the biggest things that pisses me off is that I had to deal with the absolute suck that is the YouTube API and develop automated content creation and BI platforms that used YouTube. Google (surprise it has something to do with OAUTH) deprecated YouTube API v2. Now you have zero ability to fully automate anything with YouTube.

Why did I have to do this in the first place? Businesses are under the impression t

Logout [of gmail] first [possibly clearing some cookies] and you'll have no problem. I have a gmail account [but I only access it through POP3/IMAP from thunderbird--thus, it's never logged in] and I don't have the same problem. I did have the same problem one time when I was logged into gmail.

If you'd rather not logout/login on gmail repeatedly, you can create a separate browser profile [Firefox, at least] for youtube, etc.

Or easier yet, cut the cord to the gmail mothership! There are other webmail products (I'm in the midst of switching to outlook.com). Yahoo and MS may have serve ads, but it's vastly less intrusive than googles omni-present tracking

Out of curiosity, why does it bother you? I consider it a great feature (the single account, not the nagging). I don't imagine it makes much of a difference to Google one way or the other with respect to information collection.

To be honest, I'll admit that a few years ago, I was a frequent user of The Pirate Bay.

Now? For less than $25 a month, I have Amazon Prime Videos, Netflix, and Hulu Plus. They provide me with, more or less, all the video content I really want. (and more than I could ever watch)

There are shows and movies that come and go from these services that I'd *like* to have, but there is so much to watch, I can't be bothered to pirate them anymore.

So finally the media companies are offering a legal service that is approaching *good enough* status. It isn't perfect and yes, there are features we don't have yet that can be had with a pirate copy, but at some point it gets close enough that my time is worth more than messing with it. For the cost of 2 movie tickets a month, we have endless things to watch (and not nearly enough time to watch them all, my "to watch list keeps growing").

I currently have DirecTV in my home, cost is about $100 a month. I'm not quite ready to ditch it yet (because of my kids, Disney and Nick are popular in my house), but I see that day coming. The few things that we watch that aren't on Prime/Netflix/Hulu can be purchased by the episode most of the time, sooner or later, cable/satellite will be really pointless.

I'm sure for many, that day has already arrived. More and more each year are likely to cut that cord, just as they did with landlines. I cut my landline in 2005 and never looked back, so will it be with DirecTV at some point.

I'll second that. I'm a heavy pirate, and the only stufff I get anymore is new movie releases and TV shows because for some incomprehensible reason, they are delayed reaching those services by weeks to over a year... or for things they don't carry in their catalog; For example, Babylon 5 is not available for instant viewing on Netflix.

For $10 a month, I've been fairly satisfied with the service; I wish the quality was better, but that is a limitation of crappy internet service that everyone in the country d

I'll second that. I'm a heavy pirate, and the only stufff I get anymore is new movie releases and TV shows because for some incomprehensible reason, they are delayed reaching those services by weeks to over a year... or for things they don't carry in their catalog; For example, Babylon 5 is not available for instant viewing on Netflix.

Yeah, that makes no sense at all.

Why not charge $1 to enable a movie early on your streaming account. It will be there eventually for free anyway, and you still only can watch it for as long as you subscribe. So, make it available on release day for $1 more or something like that, and then would-be pirates have to decide whether it is worth futzing with torrents and having to wait an hour or two to start watching it to save $1. Don't make it like pay-per-view where you only get it for the day or whatever

I mostly use piratebay for downloading shows from England. Downton Abbey for my wife is one. Frankly there is more on DirectTV than I'll ever have time to watch. I can't bother streaming anything. My wife DVR's a lot of shows and occasionally I'll sit and watch one with her, mostly cooking shows or the like. Occasionally I'll watch football or baseball. Really if it wasn't for the wife and the grandkids I wouldn't miss any of it much. Game of Thrones and Justified are the only two shows I regularly w

The thing I still use torrents for is to find really old stuff (we are talking 20s-50s here, mostly "horror"). There are lots of old gems to be found on TPB, which I do not think will ever be offered by any commercial streaming service. To be fair, most of those fringe downloads are abmyssably slow. Because of this, I still think that the torrents will fill a niche also when the true pirates have disappeared. It would be great if there was a repository with 1) legal now public domain movies (the old stuff)

It won't be long before our fully-purchased representatives finish overturning the last vestiges of Network Neutrality, allowing our Rightful Owners to specify and enforce the proper balance of Internet traffic.

Our customers have reported stuttering, loss of signal, blackouts, and insertion of pornographic images and video into their streams. We are doing everything we can to fix this problem. In the meantime you might consider upgrading to Xfinity streaming service, which we guarantee will not be hit by these glitches.

As a long-time Comcast customer it seems to me things are going in the other direction - better! They had a 250GB cap for a while and then gave up on it. Years ago, youtube used to stall all the time and now rarely does. Then youtube was OK but then Netflix (then Prime) always paused to buffer at least a couple times during a show, whereas now it hardly ever does. I've been a VOIP user since I think 2004 (Vonage then Ooma) and, whereas it was initially fairly embarrassing to use, the spousal complaint r

That's good to hear since my FIOS connection has been sucking shit for YouTube videos lately. According to independent investigations done by FIOS customers who happen to be network engineers, the problem is on Verizon's end. Some people are claiming similar issues with Netflix on FIOS. I just bought an HD TV antenna and I'm going to switch to Comcast for internet since YouTube has a chance of working on their network. Seriously Verizon, what's the point of 75 Mbps down when your network is slowing down

Sometimes it works great, but there are times I do end up giving up on it.

I can confirm that Netflix and Amazon Prime Video work perfectly, first time, every time, no buffering.

150 meg down, 65 meg up, and thankfully no caps. I VPN my home to my office with it (and keep the files synced between them) and I also backup online with two different services (Crashplan and Backblaze), plus use streaming services every day, I actually don't know what

While I realize that you're not a Verizon spokesperson, your attitude seems to mirror theirs. Either way, they spent thousands of dollars to hook up my FIOS for a couple of years of service only for me to switch to another ISP and leave their equipment to rot. As a customer, I don't care why YouTube has such poor service over FIOS - I just know that people on Comcast don't have this issue and I can resolve it by switching ISPs.

I can log into their portal and see that I've not been within their 250 "cap" for months, yet I've received no communication from them. The instant I get a letter from them, I start with the alternative that doesn't cap. I'll go back to 5 Mbit DSL if I have to if it comes without caps.

I'd rather give my money to a company that increases profits by serving their customers.

As a long-time Comcast customer it seems to me things are going in the other direction - better! They had a 250GB cap for a while and then gave up on it.

They had a 90GB cap for a while, and then gave up on it! Guess I was a Comcast customer before you. This was before they had a page that would tell you when you went over the cap, and before you could get a front-line employee to tell you what the cap was. The third guy I talked to finally spilled the beans, and I finally stopped getting letters from Comcast when I stopped going over 90. This was probably a decade ago now, my god we've had cable internet a long time and yet where I live now I'm still on a s

Go watch YouTube's biggest star with the largest channel -- PewDiePie. More than 15,000,000 subscribers

Of course, the beauty of the Internet is that the stupidity of YouTube's top N channels doesn't effect me one bit. The content I find interesting is all there and available as well, and I never need to see (or even know about the existence of) any of the silly channels listed in the parent post.

Contrast that with television, where almost every show has to be dumbed down to appeal to a wide audience.

PS3 in a drop down fashion are NetFlix, youtube, then of course Amazon instant videos and Red Boxshowed up on the last update -4.5.

Flame: Know how time consuming it was to find that reddit link? It used to be a tab on my browser.

Yesterday I updated Opera 12 to version 17. I didn't want to lose the/. taking me to slashdot feature so put it off.Opera doesn't have bookmarks anymore, how truly asinine is that? Nor can I disable flash, and much more.So I don't use Opera after well since forever, but FireFox that auto log's me into a site (for the moment).and off topic but I'm still hot over it.

Why download a 4GB HD file and have to store, let it sit there for years when you can stream it and forget about it after 'consuming it'. As for youtube videos, no one wants to hold on to that stuff--it's short term memory videos anyway and google stores it for free....

Sure you can take that BT file and store in your cloud, but LIRC lots of cloud storage costs money (since the free account limit you at what, 5GB?).

What's killing P2P file sharing is not the offerings (though the netflix, youtube), but the co

illegal video downloads used to be of fixed size. Some traction of multiple of CD or DVD media. eg: 350mb, 700mb, 1.4gb, 4.7gb,

It seems lately the sizes have been shrinking, the compression rates are getting higher. A 40 minute TV show is now less than 300mb in "SD" quality.A year or so ago, they were 350mbThe 700mb quality has also dropped to around 560mb.

If you click a few levels through the story, you'll find that the data comes from Sandvine, whose customers are the big telecoms. Considering the battle over net neutrality, I'd say that Sandvine is not a neutral source in this discussion.

I'd like to see data from some other sources on "Netflix and Youtube are half of all Internet traffic".

Not everyone who gets paid by an industry is automatically in its pocket. In this case, they gain nothing by doctoring the report.

Sandvine's numbers are taken as fact by pretty much everyone in the know. When I was in grad school, they were the ones posting the numbers saying that torrents accounted for whatever insane percentage of Internet traffic that they once accounted for (30%+, as I recall), and practically every research paper I read quoted something Sandvine had published at some point. As I recall, the reason they're able to get such accurate numbers is because their customers are the big telecoms, which gives them the sort of access they need to make these assessments. Without that sort of access, the best you could do is get some numbers from large universities, local ISPs, and CDNs. Of those, the first two wouldn't be useful in the least for extrapolating traffic patterns to the population at large, and good luck getting these sorts of numbers from the CDNs.

Look back on Sandvine's historical data and you'll see that they haven't exactly done the entrenched telecoms any favors, since they seem to just tell it like it is, time and again, regardless of what the implications may be.

This is all the entertainment industry needs to do. Get behind a financial sane method of delivering media, that's more convenient than pirating, and the "war" is over. Prohibition is never the answer, yet it always seems to be the first response.

Meanwhile Bittorrent traffic is down slightly (7.4% from 10%) in Internet traffic compared to last year. Could more people be satisfied with current video offerings or are less people finding useful things to download via file sharing?

Or, could it be that someone doesn't understand percentages? If there are three people in a room, and two are using BitTorrent, that's 67%. If a fourth person walks in, and two people are still using BitTorrent, usage isn't down at all, but the percentage shrank to 50%.

BitTorrent traffic could be shrinking, or it could be holding steady, or it could even be increasing, just not enough for its proportion of total Internet traffic to even remain constant. But you can't tell anything by just looking at percentages of the whole like that.

1 - If you like obscure stuff, chances are its not there2 - Many people don't like to have to be "online" just to watch or listen, or read. ( and be at the mercy of the provider and what they feel like offering this month )

It's not like this is one of the cases where the, the wrong version flows well enough to let it slip ("12 items or less"), it even reads awkwardly. You'd think the writer would have stopped to go 'wait, that doesn't sound right' at the very least.

I've seen a lot of other charts that categorize all traffic or it defaults into "other" or "misc" or whatever. Those categories are always small, so unless this new BitTorrent traffic is also invisible packets, it won't be disappearing, just shifting categories. VPN traffic has been going up, which may be largely caused my BitTorrent, but hard to say and still much much less than naked BitTorrent traffic.